Inside Bodenstown church in County Kildare, two granite blocks sit as the surviving fragments of what was likely a single baptismal font, probably dating to the 13th century. What makes them worth a second look is not their size or condition but a small, easily overlooked detail: a pair of opposing mortices cut into the basin piece, tiny recesses that once held iron rivets leaded into the stone. Those rivets, in turn, held a cover and a lock.

The reason a font needed locking is explained by a constitution issued in 1236 by Edmund Rich, Archbishop of Canterbury, which required that baptismal fonts be secured against misuse, particularly the theft of holy water for use in folk magic or unofficial rites. A comparable font found at Sherlockstown, roughly a mile to the east-southeast, displays the same mortice arrangement, and it is through the study of that Sherlockstown example, documented by Sherlock in the late nineteenth century, that the function of the Bodenstown mortices was identified. The two fonts are closely related in form and almost certainly in date. The Bodenstown piece survives as two separate granite blocks: a square base measuring approximately 0.67 metres on each side, with a tapering circular perforation through its centre, and a slightly larger basin block, 0.8 metres square, carrying the shallow bowl with those telltale recesses. Whether the two were ever reunited after some earlier dispersal, or simply came to rest together, is not recorded.